Petri Nets in Multi-Paradigm Modelling

                          Hans Vangheluwe

               University of Antwerp - Flanders Make
         Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
       IOF consortium on Cyber-Physical Systems (NEXOR)
      Antwerp Systems and software Modelling group (AnSyMo)
          Modelling, Simulation and Design Lab (MSDL)
                   Middelheimlaan 1, office G.116
                      2020 Antwerp, Belgium
                   Hans.Vangheluwe@uantwerp.be
              http://msdl.cs.mcgill.ca/people/hv/



Abstract. Engineered systems today are characterized by an ever in-
creasing complexity. This complexity is due to a large number of het-
erogeneous components as well as diverse concerns such as safety and
energy efficiency by many stakeholders who develop these systems col-
laboratively.
Multi-paradigm Modelling (MPM) proposes to model every part and as-
pect of such complex systems explicitly, at the most appropriate level(s)
of abstraction, using the most appropriate modelling formalism(s). This
includes the explicit modelling of the often complex engineering work-
flows.
Petri Nets have proven to to be an appropriate "assembly language" for
a whole class of problems. The talk starts from simple Place/Transition
nets and shows how some extra constructs are needed to explicitly model
time and fairness. As adding these constructs to a Petri Net is not in-
tuitive and quite cumbersome and error prone, it is desirable to use
an appropriate Domain-Specific Language (DSL) and map it onto Petri
Nets. Some examples will be given of this and other uses of Petri Nets
for MPM: a Power Window with heterogeneous components and safety
requirements for analysis, a railway system with a continuous-time com-
ponent and a non-deterministic environment for co-simulation analysis of
rule-based model transformations, and enactment of workflow languages.
14   PNSE’19 – Petri Nets and Software Engineering